Today’s theme is: Stories (Or: Dutch podcasts)

Achter het verhaal (“Behind the story”) – This podcast interviews journalists to get the ‘story behind the story’ for an article published in the print or online newspaper. It’s from ‘Dagblad van het Noorden’, or ‘Daily paper from the north’ as a rough translation. When in doubt, pick the newspaper stories that interest you the most to listen to.

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1 minuut / Plots – 1 minuut is a podcast with stories that last about 1 minute each. A great way to learn the language. My only criticism is that you need to have a podcast player that can automatically play the next episode, but that is nothing against the podcast itself. On the other side you have ‘Plots’, true stories told over about 45 minutes. Both are by VPRO, as is Toendra above.

VPRO also has podcasts ‘1 minuutjes jeugd’ and ‘1 minuutjes kleuters’, both of which are more appropriate for children to listen to.

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Of course I also have my favorite podcasts in English. I’d prefer to listen to similarly quality Dutch podcasts to kill two birds with one stone (enjoy myself and hear more Dutch) but you cannot have it all. Some of the English language podcasts I listen to could be best categorized as docudrama’s or serialized fiction – stories broken up and told week by week or month by month.

The Black Tapes podcast – inspired by Serial (a non-fiction podcast following the case of someone imprisoned for his girlfriend’s murder), The Black Tapes is described as “a serialized docudrama about one journalist’s search for truth, her enigmatic subject’s mysterious past and the literal and figurative ghosts that haunt them both”. Season one just finished.

Limetown – “Ten years ago, over three hundred men, women and children disappear from a small town in Tennessee, never to be heard from again. In this seven-part podcast, American Public Radio host Lia Haddock asks the question once more “What happened to the people of Limetown?” (But be warned – there’s only a few episodes ready and there seems to be a small delay publishing more.)